Today’s new entry in our A.I. Journal is about one of the popular components of Artificial Intelligence - Natural Language Processing (NLP). Given that chatbots and automatic personal assistants are becoming a big trend, let us briefly talk about how NLP is playing a part. Next time you come across it, you will be prepared.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a component of Artificial Intelligence and computational linguistics. It relates to an interaction between computers and humans. One of the commonly researched tasks in NLP involve natural language understanding, which is means of conversion of human language into organised notational concepts for computers to understand. For instance, when you say something to a computer with NLP ability, it will process the information and give you a relevant answer.

Another aspect comes with questioning answering between the two, through NLP computers can answer basic questions asked by humans. Recent technology are looking even at answering of complex questions. Popular example of this is, IBM Watson. Speech processing is also an element of NLP amongst many others. This uses a sound clip of a person speaking to determine the textual representation of the speech.

The goal of NLP is to allow a kind of interaction between a human and machine whereby verbal instructions can be given without the use of cracking a code. So, if you are not a programmer or a developer, you can still obtain useful information from these computing systems.

Enabling machines to understand and process your language creates numerous lay back from human tasks. NLP Intelligence can be categorised into two main applications which is useful for humans - Text based and Dialogue based. Text-Based Application evolves around searching for certain topics, newsgathering, extracting specific data from large sets or translating one language to another. Let us say, if you are conducting a survey on large population, NLP intelligence can extract categorial statistics from large sets of data for your analysis.

Whilst, dialogue-based application works by answering your questions, voice recognitions, answering phones without operators - All learned and performed based on your natural way of communicating. We are already familiar with these types of automated online assistants or conversant chatbots such as Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Kik operating by processing our language and acting upon accordingly.

Have a look at our relative article on ChatBots, and learn how the world is acquiring these pocket assistants.